A R\'enyi entropy perspective on topological order in classical toric code models

TL;DR

This paper explores how classical R'enyi entropies reveal topological order in classical systems, identifies a new connectivity contribution affecting entropy measurements, and demonstrates these concepts through simulations of a classical toric code model.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of a connectivity contribution to R'enyi entropies in classical systems and analyzes its impact on detecting topological order.

Findings

A universal subleading topological contribution in classical R'enyi entropies.

Identification of a connectivity contribution proportional to the number of connected parts.

Demonstration of the stability of classical topological order under magnetic fields and finite temperatures.

Abstract

Concepts of information theory are increasingly used to characterize collective phenomena in condensed matter systems, such as the use of entanglement entropies to identify emergent topological order in interacting quantum many-body systems. Here we employ classical variants of these concepts, in particular R\'enyi entropies and their associated mutual information, to identify topological order in classical systems. Like for their quantum counterparts, the presence of topological order can be identified in such classical systems via a universal, subleading contribution to the prevalent volume and boundary laws of the classical R\'enyi entropies. We demonstrate that an additional subleading $O(1)$ contribution generically arises for all R\'enyi entropies $S^{(n)}$ with $n \geq 2$ when driving the system towards a phase transition, e.g. into a conventionally ordered phase. This additional subleading term, which we dub connectivity contribution, tracks back to partial subsystem ordering and is proportional to the number of connected parts in a given bipartition. Notably, the Levin-Wen summation scheme -- typically used to extract the topological contribution to the R\'enyi entropies -- does not fully eliminate this additional connectivity contribution in this classical context. This indicates that the distillation of topological order from R\'enyi entropies requires an additional level of scrutiny to distinguish topological from non-topological $O(1)$ contributions. This is also the case for quantum systems, for which we discuss which entropies are sensitive to these connectivity contributions. We showcase these findings by extensive numerical simulations of a classical variant of the toric code model, for which we study the stability of topological order in the presence of a magnetic field and at finite temperatures from a R\'enyi entropy perspective.